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I
was just looking into this the other day and wondering about the fact
that we have had no information about this since 2011 – then the
methane plumes had gone from 30 cm to 1 kilometer.
Talk
about exponential!
The
Arctic Methane Monster Stirs: NASA’s CARVE Finds Plumes as Large as
150 Kilometers Across Amidst Year of Troubling Spikes
15
July, 2013
In late June and early July, Barrow Alaska showed two methane readings in excess of 1975 parts per billion. Sadly, this most recent methane spike is likely not to be an outlier.
The
Barrow spike came in conjunction with a number of other anomalously
high methane readings in the Arctic region during 2013. Most notably,
the Kara, Barents and Norwegian Seas all showed atmospheric methane
levels spiking to as high as 1935 parts per billion during the first
half of 2013.
(Kara,
Barents, Norwegian Methane. Image source: Dr. Yurganov)
Averages
in this and other regions around the Arctic are at new record highs
even as atmospheric methane levels continue inexorably upward. For
reference, Mauna Loa shows average global atmospheric methane levels
are now at around 1830 parts per billion. These levels were around
700 parts per billion at the start of the industrial revolution
before they rocketed upward, roughly alongside increasing CO2
concentrations, as fossil fuel based industry saw its dramatic
expansion over the past couple of centuries.
Now,
human global warming is beginning to unlock a monstrous store of
methane in the Arctic. A source that, in the worst case, could be
many times the volume of the initial human emission. To this point,
areas around the Arctic are now showing local methane levels above
1950 parts per billion with an ever-increasing frequency. The issue
is of great concern to scientists, a number of which from NASA are
now involved in an investigative study to unearth how large and
damaging this methane beast is likely to become. (You
can keep account of these methane spike regions in real time using
the Methane Tracker Google app linked here.
)
CARVE
Finds 150 Mile Wide Methane Plumes
A
NASA program is now surveying Arctic methane releases to determine
their level of amplifying feedback to human caused warming.
Understanding the Arctic’s response to human warming is very
important because vast stores of carbon many times the volume of
human emissions over the past 200 years lay locked in both permafrost
and in methane hydrates throughout the Arctic. As humans have caused
the Earth to warm, sea ice and tundra melt have allowed organic
carbon to decompose and bubble up in the form of methane and CO2 with
ever greater force. Since a significant fraction of these Arctic
carbon releases are in the form of methane, and because methane
provides as much as 100 times the warming effect of CO2 by volume,
even a small proportionate release of this vast carbon store could
provide an extraordinarily powerful amplifying feedback to human
caused climate change.
Recent
studies have found that only a 1.5 degree Celsius global temperature
increase puts these stores in jeopardy of large release. The amount
of warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution is already at
least .8 degrees Celsius (about 1/6th the difference between now and
the last ice age, but on the side of hot). Perhaps more importantly,
temperature forcing by human greenhouse gas emissions have done
proportionately more work to melt ice and warm oceans than previously
expected. As a result, the ice which locks in these vast carbon
stores is disappearing at a rate far greater than most global models
anticipated. This more rapid pace of thaw causes Earth Systems
feedbacks to human warming to be an increasingly dire issue now.
As
a result, we already have numerous instances of increased methane
release around the Arctic. In 2011, a Russian expedition to the East
Siberian Arctic shelf found vast plumes of methane 1 kilometer across
rising up from the sea bed. All across the Arctic, researchers are
finding methane bubbling up from tundra melt ponds. The
concentrations of some of these melt ponds are so high that, in some
cases, they burst into plumes of flame when lit.
(Methane release from Arctic Melt ponds in high enough concentration to burn when lit. Image source: Sustainable Development Blog)
These
methane sources also provide a serious fire hazard to the fragile
Arctic environment, serving as fuel to massive tundra fires. Such
fuel sources likely worsened a number of Arctic fires including this
year’s Quebec
inferno in which a single fire consumed 1,600,000 acres and sent
plumes of smoke all the way across the Atlantic to Europe
or last year’s
Siberian fires that consumed millions of acres and whose smokes
crossed the Pacific to fill valleys in Canada.
The soot from these fires is yet one more amplifying feedback to
climate change, as
evidenced in a recent Los Alamos Laboratories study.
Arctic fires, of late, have packed a punch far more powerful than
even their southern brethren who’ve caused so much damage and loss
to communities in recent years. The explosive nature of these tundra
fires is plainly visible in this image of a massive Alaska blaze,
larger than Rhode Island, provided below:
Now,
CARVE is finding its own evidence of massive Arctic methane
emissions. Charles Miller, NASA’s principle investigator for the
CARVE project,
in a recent article,
noted that the mission had discovered numerous atmospheric methane
plumes in the Arctic. Some of these atmospheric plumes were of
immense and troubling size, stretching as wide as 150 miles across.
Miller
also notes:
“As
temperatures warm, it’s thought that … organic materials could
decompose more rapidly and give rise to gases such as carbon dioxide
and methane,” Miller said. “The anticipated release of
carbon should accelerate climate change…I think the experts all
agree that that’s the case. The question that we’re grappling
with is how much carbon might be vulnerable to release, and how fast
might it be released.”
The
CARVE mission is still in progress and end results are pending. But
these initial reports from Miller and his team add to the disturbing
evidence already arising from the Arctic. Evidence that became widely
apparent in 2012 as Arctic methane release emerged as a powerful
amplifying feedback to human-caused warming.
In short, it appears that the Arctic methane response to human
warming began sometime late last century and ramped up throughout the
2000s. Now, the Arctic appears to be providing an increasingly
powerful amplifying feedback to human caused warming. It is a
dangerous situation and one that should be abated as swiftly as
possible through a prompt series of ongoing actions.
To
these points, the following video, provided by NBC News gives
excellent context.
I
would, however, like to add one caveat:
Global
warming is not likely to unfold in a manner similar to the events
depicted in the sci-fi movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” The pace
of damage will be slower at first with weather worsening over time,
sea level rise gradually worsening, and impacts to crops and
agriculture increasing year by year, decade by decade. In this long
ramping up period, there are increasing risks of single catastrophic
events. But such events won’t have a neat finish. They will happen
again and again, with risks and effects worsening as atmospheric heat
energy increases. Perhaps, most importantly, humans will have to
recover from these events in base conditions that are already
difficult to manage.
As
such, human climate change represents a long emergency of
increasingly worsening base conditions even as the risk of
increasingly damaging catastrophic events continues to rise over
time. It is this ratcheting effect of climate change that makes it so
deadly. The increasingly difficult base conditions make maintenance
of human civilization far more difficult even as it reduces the
chance that human systems will effectively recover from a number of
devastating catastrophes that are surely in the pipe.
Once
the climate juggernaut gets rolling it unleashes and multiplies a
number of terribly monstrous and ever-worsening events. And it is for
this critical reason that we need to get a handle on our carbon
emissions as rapidly as possible.
Links:
Sustainable
Development Blog
Dushanbe, capital of the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan
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